Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Volume 39
Issue 2 Testimonies of Environmental Injustice in the Article 2
Global South

1-1-2015

Putting Environmental Injustice on the Map:

Ecotestimonies from the Global South
Erin S. Finzer
University of Arkansas - Little Rock, esfinzer@ualr.edu

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Recommended Citation
Finzer, Erin S. (2015) "Putting Environmental Injustice on the Map: Ecotestimonies from the Global South," Studies in 20th & 21st
Century Literature: Vol. 39: Iss. 2, Article 2. https://doi.org/10.4148/2334-4415.1837

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Putting Environmental Injustice on the Map: Ecotestimonies from the
Global South
Abstract
This introductory essay to STTCL 39.2 discusses the importance of testimony as a flexible literary genre that
can tell the stories of environmental injustice in the Global South, which is disproportionately affected by
environmental violence and less represented in the growing global environmental movement.

Keywords
ecotestimony, environmental injustice, Global South, testimonio, resistance literature, climate change

Cover Page Footnote

This special issue was compiled in fond memory of Nao Ueda, environmental activist, urban homesteader, and
friend.

This introductory material is available in Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol39/iss2/2
 Finzer: Ecotestimonies from the Global South

Putting Environmental Injustice on the Map:

Ecotestimonies from the Global South

Erin S. Finzer
University of Arkansas, Little Rock

A while back, I posted to Facebook a link to the Climate Stories Project,

which features an interactive global map of individuals’ oral histories bearing
witness to climate change. I commented about how exciting this multi-media
storytelling project was, but complained that all of the testimonies were located in
the Global North.1 A friend then made the comment: “Maybe that’s because
climate change doesn’t exist outside of North America?” Implicit climate
denialism aside, his comment drove home for me the importance and timeliness
of this special issue of Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature,
“Testimonies of Environmental Justice in the Global South.” Because voices from
the poor communities of Asia, Africa, and the Americas (collectively known as
the Global South) can be hard to hear, it is imperative that the global
environmental movement seek out these voices and help them to communicate to
the rest of the world how climate change and environmental injustice
disproportionately impact everyday life in their communities. With its trademark
urgency and implicit call to action, the genre of literary testimony serves as a
flexible and compelling intervention for telling the stories of environmental
injustice across the earth. Moreover, newly on-line and open-access, STTCL is
ideal for publishing on environmental testimonies because it does not require the
trees or fossil fuels that paper journals entail and it is capable of reaching readers
anywhere.
Particularly vulnerable due to tropical locations, precarious living
conditions, and neoliberal economic practices, the peoples of the Global South
increasingly find themselves victims of environmental violence that they did
nothing to create. In fact, in the new millennium, environmental violence stands
likely to threaten global human rights on a scale equal to or greater than that of
the combined political repression, warfare, and genocides of the twentieth
century.2 Environmental violence includes both environmental degradation—in
the forms of contamination and the abuse and depletion of natural resources—and
climate-driven natural disasters, such as hurricanes, typhoons, heat waves,
overpopulation, extinction, wildfires, water problems, superstorms, extreme
flooding, drought, mudslides, and changes in ocean temperature and sea level.
Much has been written on why issues of climate change and
environmental degradation have gained little traction in the Global North. Climate
denialism tends to follow the fault lines of political and economic ideologies, and
environmental psychologists have cited anxiety, apathy, a lack of empathy, and

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 Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, Vol. 39, Iss. 2 [2015], Art. 2

melancholy as common emotional responses to the overwhelming problem of

climate change.3 Recently, Naomi Klein wrote about how “market
fundamentalism has systematically sabotaged our collective response to climate
change,” making us feel “not only incapable of self-preservation, but not worth
saving” (62). No matter where one falls on the ideological and affective
spectrums, confronting environmental violence on a global scale will require that
the North adopt a radically different model of civilization whose economy and
culture are not dependent on third-world labor and fossil fuels.4 It will also require
a fundamental change in the stories we tell: starting perhaps with the early
writings of the Judeo-Christian tradition, Western narratives position humans as
separate from, and in dominion over, nature. We must find ways to re-interpret
and re-frame these master narratives in a way that engenders humankind’s
responsibilities of environmental stewardship and sustainable living, as well as
empathy towards the non-human world.
Changing our cultural narrative is where writers and critics have a stake in
the global environmental movement. Powerful storytelling counts among the most
effective forms of activism as speakers and writers use story to build empathy in
audiences, and persuade them to join their cause. Especially in testimonial
literature, storytelling can empower the individual telling the story, as we can see
in the now classic titles of Rigoberta Menchú Tum and Domitila Barrios de
Chúngara, Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú, y así me nació la consciencia (1983;
literally, ‘My Name is Rigoberta Menchú, and This is How my Consciousness
was Born’; published in English as I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman From
Guatemala) and Si me permiten hablar… Domitila, una mujer de las minas de
Bolivia (1978; Let me speak! Testimony of Domitila, a Woman of the Bolivian
Mines). Yet another use of testimonial literature is simply working through
trauma—be it due to social or environmental violence—thus allowing activist
writers and readers to continue their struggles for justice.5
Ecocritic Rob Nixon remarks on the difficulty that Western civilization
seems to have with coming to terms with climate change and the need for
storytelling. He writes about the “slow violence” of environmental degradation
and the need for literary and filmic interventions to make it more visible. He
states that “imaginative writing can help make the unapparent appear,” and that it
is the job of “writer-activists [to] offer us a different kind of witnessing” (15).
This special issue of STTCL features just such writer-activists and critic-activists
who engage the genre of testimonial literature to imagine and give voice to
diverse experiences of environmental violence in the French and Spanish-
speaking Global South.
Scholars have disputed testimonial literature—or texts that give voice to
subaltern subjects bearing witness to violent events—since Cuba’s Casa de las
Américas first awarded a prize in testimonio in 1970. Initially conceptualized as a

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DOI: 10.4148/2334-4415.1837
 Finzer: Ecotestimonies from the Global South

separate literary genre in Latin America, testimonial literature can be found

throughout the world as subaltern texts that contest official versions of
oppression, atrocities, and abuse. Testimony, which was once viewed as a “true,”
non-fiction narrative of witness involving a subaltern informant and an educated
interlocutor, is now accepted as a broader genre—and even, I would argue, a
discourse—of witness that includes creative works in narrative, poetry, theatre,
and the visual and performing arts.6 These diverse texts share both their urgent
accounts of violence and a collective cultural critique of hegemonic power
structures that reinforce and reproduce political, economic, and social violence in
myriad forms.
Especially since the controversy surrounding the veracity of Rigoberta
Menchú’s 1983 testimony, hundreds of critics have explored the troublesome
nature of the genre. During the seemingly peaceful, neoliberal 1990s and early
2000s, many critics began to wonder if testimony was dead.7 If testimony enjoyed
its initial moment during Latin America’s armed conflicts of the 1970s and 80s, I
suggest that we are on the verge of a second wave of testimony that engages not
only political violence per se, but also systemic and environmental violence that
is right now being waged across the Global South. To my definition above, then, I
add that texts of this second wave of “ecotestimonio” (a term that seems to have
originated with Louise Detwiler and Alice Driver) actively critique the power
structures—in particular, those of neoliberal capitalism—that reinforce and
reproduce environmental violence in all parts of the globe.
The six essays in this special issue approach ecotestimonies of the Global
South in six different ways, but they are ordered in a way to call attention to the
themes or perspectives they share in common. The first two essays look at
environmental testimonies that are also detective novels. In “Teaching ‘Global
Learning’ through the Ecotestimonio: Ojos negros by Eduardo Sguiglia in Class,”
Laura Barbas-Rhoden walks us through teaching Sguiglia’s novel—which spans
Argentina, Angola, and Mexico—with values-based rubrics and activities that
enable students to combine critical analysis and global thinking by revealing the
deep economic structures of transnational exploitation and consumption
underlying the text’s narrative structure as crime fiction. Barbas-Rhoden
ultimately leads students to understanding how environmental stories are
inherently human stories in which we all play a role through our choices as
consumers.
Julia Frengs analyzes two detective novels from New Caledonia as
environmental testimonies in her essay, “Anticipatory Testimonies:
Environmental Disaster in Claudine Jacques’s Fictional Prophecies.” Here Frengs
explores L’Âge du perroquet-banane, Parabole païenne (‘The Age of the
Parrotfish, Pagan Parable’) and Nouméa mangrove, which predict environmental
catastrophes that will come as a result of Oceania’s abandonment of indigenous

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culture and wisdom. Frengs explains that, as detective fiction, both of these
novels ultimately “question truth and attempt to expose exploitative practices that
have damaged the environment” (4). Interpersonal crime is woven with
environmental crime, and the reader joins the fictional detective in discovering the
evidence that reveals the guilty party, whether an individual or a system.
Resha Cardone and I both engage Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the
Philosophy of History” to link environmental devastation and the violence
wrought by late capitalism. Drawing on the pile of debris that represents for
Benjamin the ongoing catastrophe of history, Cardone’s essay, “Nona
Fernández’s Mapocho: Spirits in a Material Wasteland,” explores the spiritual and
material realities of waste in the contaminated Mapocho River, which cuts
through the city of Santiago, Chile. Contaminated with urban, agricultural, and
industrial waste, the river was also used for dumping the remains of disappeared
activists after the Pinochet coup in 1973. Cardone shows how Fernández’s novel
is composed of palimpsests of waste: present-day pollution piled upon unwanted
cadavers. Flowing through the city, the river and its contaminated load haunt the
landscape and the novel’s main characters. Together, the blighted city, the living,
and the dead present a gothic, postmodern wasteland that meshes questions of
national history, family, and exile with urban decay and environmental ruin.
In “Bleeding Mud: The Testimonial Poetry of Hurricane Mitch in
Nicaragua,” I frame this 1998 superstorm and harbinger of global warming as
Benjamin’s storm of progress. I analyze how testimonial poetry—a genre once
used in Sandinista workshops to work through trauma from the civil war—gave
Nicaraguans a way to give voice to the human suffering caused by Hurricane
Mitch. Characterized almost universally by images of mud and messages of
disbelief (in God and in the sheer level of devastation), this poetry bears direct
witness to a climate catastrophe, which I refer to as a “punctuated moment” in the
slow violence of climate change.
Joel Postema also works with Nicaragua, or the fictional country of
“Faguas,” in his essay, “Testimonial Ecology in Gioconda Belli’s El país de las
mujeres.” Postema argues that, as a sequel to Belli’s 1988 testimonial novel La
mujer habitada (The Inhabited Woman), El país de las mujeres (‘The Country of
Women,’ 2010) destabilizes the genre of testimonial fiction by fancifully
presenting Faguas as an ecofeminist utopia. Earth plays a defining role in this
narrative by way of causing a volcanic eruption whose gases cause testosterone
levels to disappear, thereby allowing women to take over the country with eco-
friendly policies and infrastructure.
Finally, in “How to Listen to the Pachamama’s Testimonio: Lessons from
Indigenous Voices,” Luis Prádanos García and Leonardo Figueroa Helland
present another visionary, Earth-centric text that defines the Andean movement,
El Vivir Bien (‘Living Well’). As a collective, open-access text, El Vivir Bien

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 Finzer: Ecotestimonies from the Global South

como respuesta a la Crisis Global (‘Living Well as a Response to the Global

Crisis’) foregrounds Andean cosmology and ethics as a model of living
sustainably and with integrity in a globalized world. Prádanos and Figueroa argue
that, by privileging a community of indigenous voices in the first-person plural,
this text interpellates Northern readers as part of its collective and compels them
to listen and heed its ancient wisdom about living in community with all creation.
As part of their critical article, the authors translate extended segments of El Vivir
Bien into English in an effort to make key parts of this heretofore untranslated text
accessible to the English-speaking world.
El Vivir Bien concludes this issue by reminding us how testimony as a
collective intervention can engender and inspire social movements that both
challenge the structures that contribute to global warming and offer alternatives to
unsustainable, consumer-minded cultural practices. Because these alternatives are
indigenous to the Global South, they are also more compatible with the global
realities of overpopulation and climate change than high-tech, dollar-driven
sustainability that tends to be propagated in the North. As part of what is now a
tradition of Latin American popular movements that have capitalized on the
Internet in recent years, El Vivir Bien demonstrates how texts in the digital age
can literally amplify local voices, putting them on the map.
At the beginning of this essay I mentioned the map associated with the
Climate Stories Project, which provides individuals from across the globe with the
guidelines (in English) and web tools to share their stories as a form of
environmental activism. The Climate Stories Project draws from the public story
theory of organizer and sociologist Marshall Ganz, who reminds us that stories
connect individuals to communities, that they teach us how to act and inspire us to
act. The kind of storytelling that Ganz promotes for social movements like
Occupy and 350.org (an online network established by environmental activist Bill
McKibbon for global grassroots climate organizations) is not unlike testimonial
storytelling, which intrinsically link individual voices to the collective by
testifying to oppression that affects the whole community. These texts carry an
intrinsic sense of urgency that, as Kimberly Nance has written, leaves readers
with no alibi for inaction (165). In just this way, testimonial storytelling is an
activist intervention.
Challenging the master Western narratives of man’s dominion over nature
and neo-capitalist ideology, ecotestimonies from the Global South have the
potential to change the stories we tell ourselves and future generations.
Advocating storytelling as activism, conservationist Peter Forbes writes about
what is at stake with activist storytelling:

Without these stories of connection and relationship, there is increasingly

one dominant story to hear and one story to tell. This is the story where the

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point of trees is board feet, the point of farms is money, the point of
people is to be consumers, and the point of other species is largely
forgotten. In failing to tell a different story, we fail to express what we
really love…. We lose an important part of ourselves. (13)

By eulogizing threatened or lost loved ones, land, well-being, and opportunity,

ecotestimonies tell a different story about what human communities value. As tiny
points on a map, these stories form a constellation of empowerment and resistance
to denial and inaction, connecting otherwise alienated populations to each other.
The engaged criticism in this special issue of STTCL participates in this project of
connection and solidarity by commenting on the vital importance of these
testimonies of environmental injustice. Often left out of the classroom and off the
bestseller list due to linguistic, market, and geopolitical barriers, the stories they
highlight here remind us that environmental violence is a global problem that is
disproportionately experienced by people living in the Global South. Perhaps
more significantly, they position us as readers, critics, translators, and educators
to have an affective stake in making sure the Global South is adequately
represented and heard in the growing global environmental movement.

Notes

1. At publication, Efleda Bautista of Tacloban City, Phillipines, had added her

testimony about Typhoon Haiyan.

2. For more on the impacts of environmental violence across the Global South in
the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, see Parenti and Klein’s Shock Doctrine.

3. See Lertzman, Weintrobe, Norgaard, and Marshall on affective responses to

climate change.

4. Klein has recently made headlines by reiterating this scientific and sociological
consensus with her recent book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The
Climate. See also her 2011 article in The Nation, “Capitalism v. the Climate.”

5. Critics Marta Caminero-Santangelo and Michelle Lynn Brown have written

about working through trauma in Haitian and African testimonial literatures,
respectively.

6. In his first chapter of Testimonio, Beverley acknowledges that testimonio has

existed across the world, probably with its beginnings in the oral traditions. He

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cites Barbara Harlow’s term “resistance literature” as a way to open the genre to
world literature (31).

7. For more on this debate, see chapter 6 of Nance.

Works Cited

Beverley, John. Testimonio: On the Politics of Truth. Minneapolis: U Minnesota

P, 2004. Print.
Brown, Michelle Lynn. “Screams Somehow Echoing: Trauma and Testimony in
Anglophone African Literature.” Diss. U of Maryland. Web. 23 January
2015.
Caminero Santangelo, Marta. “At the Intersection of Trauma and Testimonio:
Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of the Bones.” Antípodas XX (5-26).
Climate Stories Project. Web. 30 Jan. 2015.
Detwiler, Louise. “Witnessing the Earth through Gáspar Pedro González’s El 13
B’aktun: La nueva era 2012.” Pushing the Boundaries of Latin American
Testimony: Meta-morphoses and Migrations. Eds. Louise Detwiler and
Janis Breckenridge. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012. 221-38. Print.
Driver, Alice. “Ciudad Juárez as Palimpsest: Searching for Eco-Testimonios.”
Pushing the Boundaries of Latin American Testimony: Meta-morphoses
and Migrations. Eds. Louise Detwiler and Janis Breckenridge. New York:
Palgrave MacMillan, 2012. 181-200. Print.
Forbes, Peter. “Giving Way to the Story.” The Story Handbook: Language and
Storytelling for Land Conservationists. Ed. Helen Whybrow. San
Francisco: The Trust for Public Land, 2002. 4-23. Print.
Harlow, Barbara. Resistance Literature. New York: Routledge, 1987. Print.
Klein, Naomi. “Capitalism v. the Climate.” The Nation. 28 November 2011.
Web. 30 Jan. 2015.
______. Shock Doctrine. New York: Picador, 2008. Print.
______. This Changes Everything: Capitalism Versus the Climate. New York:
Simon & Schuster, 2014. Kindle file.
Lertzman, Renee. “The Myth of Apathy.” Web. 30 Jan. 2015.
Marshall, George. Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to
Ignore Climate Change. New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2014. Print.
Nance, Kimberly. Can Literature Promote Justice? Trauma Narrative and Social
Action in Latin American Testimonio. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 2006.
Print.

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Norgaard, Kari Marie. Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and

Everyday Life. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2011. Print.
Parenti, Christian. Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of
Violence. New York: Nation, 2011. Print.
Weintrobe, Sally. Engaging with Climate Change: Psychoanalytic and
Interdisciplinary Perspectives. New York: Routledge, 2012. Print.

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